The Spiritual Vision of Memories of Tomorrow’s Sunrise

Posted on by Diversions LA

Art fills the soul as well as the eyes in the poetic Memories of Tomorrow’s Sunrise at CSULA’s Ronald H. Silverman Fine Arts Gallery. Curated by Jason Jenn and Vojislav Radovanovic with Mika Cho, the four-gallery exhibition is a deep dive into what makes us human, and what makes each human who they are.

Participating artists include Enrique Castrejon, Serena JV Elston, Anita Getzler, Jason Jenn, Ibuki Kuramochi, Marne Lucas, Trinh Mai, Vojislav Radovanović, Hande Sever,  Marval A Rex, Kayla Tange, Nancy Kay Turner, and Jessica Wimbley.

The works are each, in their own way, about the connective tissue of ancestry and relationships, identity, and history – both genealogical and spiritual. Some honor family, both those of our bloodlines and those chosen long after birth. Others focus on exploring present hopes and past dreams. There are images that witness loss, honor mentors, explore sexuality, refer to tragedies, relate to purpose, and search for true essence of being alive.

Primarily mixed media in terms of medium, these works are as layered visually as they are with meaning. While each artist’s creation can stand on its own, the interaction between the works is important here. There is real effort in not just bringing the art together in visual conversation, but in allowing viewers and artists alike to explore the power of personal understanding.

The show’s title suggests, according to the curators, that “Collectively, we are the ancestors of tomorrow’s sunrise and someday we shall all be but a memory.” As viewers, we pass unseen as ghosts in front of each, very much alive, work. Conversely, we are also participants in future memories of our own, involved in the immersive experience of viewing, and in our own individual inchoate ways, seeking to share and preserve what we’ve seen.

The large-scale work from Enrique Castrejon, “The Realization You are Losing Your Memory with Frequent Confusion and Disorientation” is a part of a larger series about his father’s chronic illnesses and dementia. Having served as a caregiver during his father’s illness, Castrejon’s electrifying image portrays a deconstructed human body in fragmented shapes, parts linked with artists tape and thumbtacks in a spidery vein-like web of concern, chaos, love, and loss. Strips of printed data from Alzehimer’s Los Angeles stripe the body parts like the wrappings on mummies.

Loss is also at the center of Hande Sever’s “2 or 3 Things I know About Her.” Walnut frames, appearing to represent coffins support and envelope a series of photographs. The photos are reenactments of her young mother’s arrest as a political prisoner during Turkey’s 1980 right-wing junta. It’s a powerful statement on identity and purpose, as well as on politics supported by the U.S. as a military business.

Vojislav Radovanovic’s “Years Devoured by Locusts” also examines the implications of imprisonment and generational trauma, as well as referencing climate change and our imprisoningly slow reaction to it. It’s a graceful work using natural elements such as a wasp nest and tree branches to create a scene that echoes both desolation and beauty. Broken mirror fragments spill like drying water under a tree derelict of leaves, analog television sets play a mix of nature images and static, signifying the potential loss of all these living things, but a wasp honeycomb revolves on a small stand with colored lights, a tiny rainbow of hope that life may still find a way.

Trinh Mai’s “Begins with Tea” takes up a front wall in the exhibition, family photos printed on joss paper, and held, along with seeds, herbs, dried noodles, and grain inside Mai’s grandmother’s used tea bags. Poignant and elegiac, the installation represents the stories about family and friends told by her grandmother over afternoon tea. The delicate, almost ephemeral tea bag pouches are as fragile as the remembrances they contain and steeped in love. A soft, barely-there scent of tea envelopes the wall on which the bags are hung with sewing needles that also belonged to the artist’s grandmother.

Also paying tribute to domestic rituals, is the largest of Nancy Kay Turner’s several fine works here, “Burnt Offerings.” Using parchment paper stained from the bread Turner baked on it during the pandemic, she adds gold leaf, glitter spray, vintage sheet music and paper tree bark among other materials collaging and painting them over the parchment. The result is a series of overlaid impressions, both abstract art and moments of hope and sorrow. Like Biblical burnt offerings, the archival work traces a period of great loss and sacrifice and creates an almost holy elegy from the act of making bread. Turner’s work also has a sub-context of another burnt offering altogether, that of those lost to flame in the Holocaust and at Hiroshima.

Anita Getzler’s “Pieces of Mourning” is direct about its heartbreaking memorial for genocide and imprisonment. There are crushed rose petals and broken rose thorns in small jars, thorny branches wrapped in bronze wire, memorial yahrzeit candle holders containing old watches – like those taken from Holocaust victims – with the faces of the watches holding more crushed petals. Getzler also includes a scroll featuring the names of those sent to concentration camps when deported from a French village. As a memoir of stories told to the artist by her parents, who were themselves holocaust survivors, it is deeply moving. As a work of art, it is a stunning mix of dark textures illuminated with the flickering glow of the brass wires, an electric yahrzeit lamp, and a spirit of love.

Brighter notes are sounded in Jason Jenn’s “sharing a seat with the poets,” depicting a mentor/mentee relationship, a tribute to chosen family. Arrayed along a settee, are precious minerals, plants and books. Colorful light plays with shadows on these special objects chosen to represent knowledge and growth, wisdom, and joy. Pillows on the floor represent the seating or and a conversation between the parties in the relationship, and a sense of warmth and love pervades the sculptural grouping.

In the exhibition’s darkroom, Kayla Tange’s “A Chance to Be Seen” glows. A sculptural display of illuminated documents of her adoption and letters between herself and her mother, the piece explores the complications of origin, human commodification, and the potency of artistic transformation. Ibuki Kuramochi’s “Prenatal Memory and Species” turns toward a larger picture, going beyond the personal to evolution, the maternal process, and the beginning of human life in her mysterious and evocative mix of projected media, chains, and a silicone pregnant belly. Expressing a fascinating connection between personal longing Serena JV Elston’s sculpture “Elemental Hunger” is among several richly involving works by the artist. As with other works in the exhibition, there is a visceral element, here the heat from the electric hot plate coil serving as the spiral center to the piece. Jessica Wimbley offers a beautiflu video collage that explores spiritual and physical edges, in “Edges.” The piece uses hair as a space for memory and storytelling.

Other works not discussed in depth are equally intrinsic parts of Memories of Tomorrow’s Sunrise, including a series of fine porcelain sculptures by Marne Lucas and vibrant mixed media from Marval A. Rex connecting mind to body.

Exhibiting artists and co-curators with gallery director Mika Cho, Jason Jenn and Vojislav Radovanovic

While many artists have created work that recalls dark events, the overall experience of the exhibition is that of hope and resilience. If art is a mirror, this mirror reflects memories, including and perhaps especially the traumatic ones, and alchemizes them with the magic that makes us human. Art grants artist and viewer alike the strength of spirit that allows us to take a good long look into the past, which is, after all, what today will be – tomorrow.

The exhibition runs through July 15th, with a closing event that day; a Zoom artist talk is set for June 28th, and an in-person performance scheduled for July 6th. The Ronald H. Silverman Gallery is located in the California State University campus Fine Arts Building.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis

 

Aviary Soared – Curated by Betty Brown at Loft at Liz’s an Astonishingly Lovely Group Show

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With Aviary, the just-closed massive group exhibition curated by Betty Brown at Loft at Liz’s, birds of many feathers flocked together in a wonderful all-media exhibition that ranged from the sculptural to paintings, mixed media, and more.

There was the fragile, poignant newspaper-based work of Nurit Avesar, and the lineoleum block ink tattoo of a fighting cock on rich crimson from Edwin Vasquez. Six stunning free-form sculptural works by Samuelle Richardson, working in fabric over armature to create birds in flight. Calling out, and about to fly, they were arrayed in the project room; Debbie Korbel’s cardboard, steel, and wood “As the Crow Flies”  took off from the floor in the front gallery.

Placed with Richardson’s work, Joanne Julian evoked the brush strokes of Japanese calligraphy in her graceful graphite, ink, and prisma color work. Cynthia James oil on copper work seethed with salmon color in the same space while Jodi Bonassi’s vibrantly colored, intensely detailed canvas works were joined by her own sepia toned, simpler birds created on paper bags, and equally sublimely magical.

Like a shedding royal cape, feathers fell from a large scale work by artists Cheryl Dullabaun and Linda Parnell in the lush, regal “Volaries.” John M. White positioned his paintings of birds on wires; L. Aviva Diamond’s riveting archival pigment prints soared in black and white.  Edwin Vasequez provided “Mayan Birds” as masks, evoking both totem poles and Mayan civilizations.

Kaoru Mansour presented works on wood panel illuminated with gold leaf and thread.

Dean and Laura Larson offered a phenomenal collaboration. Laura Larson’s astonishingly alive bronze sculptures, “Birds in Mourning,” were paired with a beautiful large-scale composite photograph by Dean Larson that placed the sculptural works within a fully invented setting.

As very different as they were striking, works by Bibi Davidson – touching on the vibrantly surreal, and rich works from Deena Capparelli both each provided immersive visual stories. Quite different works by Roberto Benevidez were equally filled with movement and power, his astonishingly alive sculptural birds perched on wooden dowls. Jill Sykes’ work glistened and shone in spare, graceful patterns.

Seventeen artists in all presented work, which viewed collectively was like entering an actual aviary, filled with varied birds from every corner of the world. Feathers, captured in sculpture or paint, photography or mixed media erupted in a swirl of motion and color, layered and lovely, fragile yet powerful.

Collectively, the works spoke to each other in a kind of contrasting, wonderful cacophony of song you could almost hear, wings you could almost feel brushing the air of the gallery space. There were resting birds, fighting birds, flying birds, perching birds, floating birds, sleeping birds. While the opening was crowded with artists and guests, on a quiet afternoon, one could almost hear the birds rustle, stir, and soar.

Vivid, beautiful odes to the longing for flight and the joy and pain of this species and our own – each work joined in this aching chorus.  If you missed it, but would like to possess a winged thing or two, reach out to the gallery or curator.

Loft at Liz’s is located at 453 S. La Brea Ave.

  • Genie Davis; photos: Genie Davis

Can You Fear and Adore Flowers? Artist Susan Melly Provides Answers in New Work at LAAA

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   In a way, who isn’t afraid, just a little bit, of flowers? We may fear their incredible fragility, of losing them to an all-too-quick death, to knowing their perfection is ephemeral and their beauty so temporary – an aching reminder of our own mortality.
   However, for artist Susan Melly in her new Emerging Fear of Flowers now at LAAA ‘s Gallery 825 in West Hollywood, her emerging fear was something different, risen from over two years of COVID-19 pandemic isolation. During that time period, Melly’s husband brought her a weekly bouquet of flowers from an open air market. As her own statement informs viewers “As my anxiety blossomed, my art making changed and became more abstract and colorful to ward off my dark feelings. Each work is embedded with a hint of humor – and the number 19 – as an homage to coping mechanisms, even as familiar sources of comfort counterintuitively transform into a strange beauty that is tinged with the edge of the unknown.”
   After about a year of receiving the flowers, despite the loving intention of bringing beauty and romance to her life, she began to ask hereslf if she would be “condemned” to receiving the flowers every single Friday for the rest of her life, indicating that the pandemic would never end. The blossoms blossomed – into increased anxiety, alleviated through her art. As viewers we can witness this progression in her new body of work, and revel in its layers, as fragile-seeming as flowers themselves.
   The works of course make use of Melly’s signature use of vintage tissue paper dress patterns, something that she terms an “integral part of my practice and personal history…” As a mixed media artist, the LA-based Melly creates work that includes paintings, assemblage-based sculptures, and installations. In this latest body of work, there is a powerful new energy as these flowers morph with the artist, spin discs on an old Victrola record player, weep, rail in anger, whine in frustration, sing, and seethe.  Do flowers mourn their entrapment in bouquets? Do they discuss day to day travails as they grow in the garden, rage and wish to curse those who pick them? While we may never know, here Melly certainly posits that they might.
   Within the primarily paint and mixed media on canvas works are a variety of sculptural pieces.  While some stand alone, a vintage sewing machine, a male figure bearing flowers, “Hanging Out,” is a wall scupture. It emerges like a being encased in and protruding from the wall itself,  a partial mannequin entrapped despite a glowing heart and uterus at its center, sheathed and layered with the dress patterns.
   The titular “Emerging Fear of Flowers” is a colorful mix of the tissue patterns, acrylic, and art paper on canvas.  While a hand holds a cocktail glass in the right corner, center stage is an alien looking three pronged flower that seems to have grown eyes, and one prong is looking and leaning and reaching ominously toward that hand. The viewer can’t help but think of Little Shop of Horrors and Audrey, that musical’s violently sentient plant.  It is a large work, vibrant with indigo and burgandy; the human hand, however, is so white it could easily belong to a person confined from the sunlight in which these flowers gained a robust if menacing vitality.
   Melly’s “Cut Stems” also makes use of the tissue dress patterns combined with acrylic.  These highly geometric flowers have sharp edged like wind mills and are exhibiting just emerging facial features.
   With “Enter Covid,”  what’s blossoming here appears to be the shape of COVID itself, entering via a kind of conduit into an abstract human vessel.  Layers of white on white recall bandages, sheets, and fog, as if a ghostly landscape now enveloped us all.

   Quoting Charles Baudelaire with the title “Evil Comes up Softly Like a Flower,” Melly uses acrylic, charcoal, and dress patterns to make one of the most ominous, yet still amusing, paintings in this series. Here, flowers have teeth and raging faces.

But they are comfortably more relatable in “Dandelion Wine,” in which a dandelion tears out its seeds in frustration.

And we can feel intense empathy for the sad blooms in works such as “Un-Still Life,” in which a lavendar, daisy-like flower has thorns and weeps purple blooded tears.

   In another work, the artist herself melds or morphs into a flower, a pale periwinkle and peacefully meditative one, in “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Lotus.” Surrounded by a geometric abstract patterns, the figure is part statue, part flower, absorbed fully in the act of blooming, yet trapped in stillness.

   Perhaps, we can hope that our time in pandemic shut down can allow us to achieve a similarly mesmerized state. Viewing Melly’s delicate, lovely, and unsettling works may just have that effect.
   Melly’s work is beautifully paired with the light-based blend of Richard Slechta’s photography and art, Incompressible Flow; Chris Madens’ glowy dimensional assemblies, The Covid Kiss; and a group show, Felicitious,  an all-media compilation depicting the current zeitgeist.
   The exhibition is on view through June 24th. Gallery 825 is located at 825 N. La Cienega.  Melly is offering curated visits; the gallery is also open by appointment at other times, reach out at gallery825@laaa.org.
Genie Davis – images provided by the artist

Susan Spector Offers Words of Wisdom

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Susan Spector’s Sticks/Stones, which just closed at TAG Gallery, is a delightful collection of text-based work filled with wit and exuberance.

Simple painted figures are featured with phrases that are inspired by a question she asked during the COVID pandemic lockdown. That question being “What is a phrase from your past that has stayed with you forever?” She was still soliciting responses on Post-It Notes at the gallery – which we can hope leads to a part two for this smart work.

It isn’t just an illustrated reproduction of these phrases that Spector is after here. Rather, she has gathered and compiled ideas that are intrinsic to our way of life, refining and exploring social issues, mental health, cultural mores. The exhibition also touches upon the way we each speak to ourselves,  and the ways in which society encourages specific forms of self-talk.

From loving advice to harsher words, the collection both charms and rivets, exposes and encourages.  The work is a significant departure from the artist’s past abstract figuration. These are simple, easy to see visualizations accompanied by text that punches both a visual palette and an emotional one.  Despite deceptive simplicity, this crowdsourced, text-based art is presented in a variety of visual ways.

Simple, heartfelt phrases such as “I matter,” “I am Enough,” and “I am at peace with who I am,” are presented on a solid colored background. The black type of the words, created in a variety of different type-faces including a cursive flourish on some words, is presented on a layer of gold leaf overlaid on the solid colored background. The viewer’s impression is that these words are especially valuable, and should be taken to heart.

Other phrases are accompanied by her unique, yet simple illustrations – a curly haired individual, holding a red heart against an outlined chest features text at the bottom of the image that reads “Always come from love not fear.” While most of the words are in black type outlined in white, the word “love” is outlined in red to match that heart; the word “fear” is simply written in black.

There are hilarious images too, including one of a screaming red face is matched with “Caution! I’m in retrograde,” highly appropros for the conclusion of a long Mercury retro just ending as the exhibition was viewed.  A female figure, chest proudly displayed, stomach sucked in, is accompanied by bold text which reads “Tits out” in pink, and “Belly in” indicated in blue, both with arrows pointing to the way in which the body should be positioned.

 

“Spend it foolishly” looks as delightful as the advice written in thick silver letters. Here, a bent-figured grandma reaches to hand two eager children dollar bills stacked in both her hands.

Nearby, a blue-skirted, wide-eyed figure perches demurely on a chair while pink letters spell out “Be A Lady” in a long line beside her,  an invisible, internalized authoritarian instructing her behavior.

Precariously balanced items plugged into a wall socket are the accompaniment to “Don’t Do Anything Stupid,” written simply in black.  In another work, a large figure points to a screen which smaller audience-member figures look up to view.  On the screen are written “3 Rules: Show Up, Speak Your Truth, Don’t Die Wondering.” Meanwhile, an aggreived looking stick figure is accompanied by a text bubble reading “Before you decide you’re depressed, make sure you’re not surrounded by a bunch of assholes.” And indeed, in close proximity all around her are what appear to be small outlines of just that – literal assholes.

 

One of the most visually beautiful works is a primarily black on black work. Written against a dense black sky, the words “It’s always darkest before the dawn” are just discernable over a gorgeous rising line of pink, orange, and gold sunlight.

Additionally fascinating were the Post-It’s added by viewers on the wall next to Spector’s work at TAG. There was “Why can’t you be more like your cousin,” next to the excellent advice “Don’t wait for everything to be okay to be happy.”  “Life is a bitch, “Brush your teeth,” and “Nobody’s Perfect” nestled close to “Take a long walk on a short pier.”

Instead, take a long look at Spector’s work, and enjoy.

Along with this exhibition, fine solo shows by David Klein, Justin Prough, and Skut were also on display, but that’s a different story.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis